


your last serving daughter

by corleones



Category: Fairy Tales and Related Fandoms
Genre: Gen, Russian Mythology, Soviet Russia
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2011-12-31
Updated: 2011-12-31
Packaged: 2017-10-28 14:06:23
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 952
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/308651
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/corleones/pseuds/corleones
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Now, she feels like a part of this monstrous tapestry.</p>
            </blockquote>





	your last serving daughter

The rooms of their new home are small and dark, the ceiling sweeping down low at the top of her head; her own quarters are an attic, a tiny atelier where one could write poetry and take vodka and if Vasilisa were unafraid as her sisters are, she would stick pictures on the walls to cover the rotting floral wall paper and light candles in the windows to keep out the night.

Vasilisa does not have these luxuries now.

Her new mother has sold her home for the price of small jewels and now, in this vast foreign city, she is as liable to lose herself as a needle in a shed of haystacks.

She sends a telegram to her father, hoping it will follow him out of Russia, to the ends of the earth wherever he may be. She asks him to come home.

When in two weeks, there is no response, Vasilisa puts on her coat and she goes out onto the streets to buy vodka and a gun and now, she feels like a part of this monstrous tapestry.

She can make do with the demons as well as her sisters, she thinks.

-

On the first winter night, the stepmother turns out the lights of the house and calls them to the table with a single lit candle showing the way.

Her face looks worn and bright.

The first thing she says is that their father is dead (her father is dead) and the second is that they are now children of the state, passed from the hands of one male influence to the other, wrapped now in the protection of the city and their citizen brothers.

 _Isn't it kind,_ she trills, her old voice cracking in the dark like a snapping whip, _Your new father to take on this task of your well being. But we can't expect him to do this for free, now can we, babushkas?_

She puts down a glass on the wooden table top the way a fist would slap into the centre of it, the way a gavel would bang and it seems too hard almost but the glass did not break, did not turn to shards in her fingers or cut her skin.

 _You must prove yourself, my children,_ she says and Vasilisa wonders if she has forgotten in this madness that she is no child of hers.

-

Their tasks are set out in the cold light of dawn: the eldest and the one that comes after her are paired off and sent into the winding streets to fetch things that are easily secured with coin, sent off with pockets full of gold.

Vasilisa is told that Baba Yaga's house on the other bank of this city has enough light to power their whole district.

If she can bring it back, she can keep it: Vasilisa takes out her gun and pulls her dead mother's trunk out from under the bed. With the doll in one hand and the gun in other, she takes the road.

-

She has heard said that Baba Yaga sits naked on a throne made of bones and drinks vodka from the skulls of her citizens but all she is sees is a skeletal figure wrapped in furs with rings on each of her fingers and despite the size of the hall in which they stand, high vaulted ceilings and blazing fires behind that remind Vasilisa of home, she is not afraid.

Baba Yaga is only an old crone in an ugly dress and white furs.

 _Did my riders lead you well?_ she asks, revealing long, wolvish teeth when she speaks.

 _I came by the sun and the light of the day._

The witch laughs, the sound skipping over the stone walls and reverberating as a cackle.

 _All fires are lit by my riders, babushka._

-

The first from the list is food for a thousand mouths, from nothing but a bit of cheese and a crumble of bread.

First, Vasilisa feeds the doll.

Then, she waits in the wings while the doll works, thick industrious fingers scrambling with a pencil as it ticks off first one task and then the other.

 _Baba Yaga,_ she thinks, smiling like a cat, _I will have my fire by the end of the week._

-

Each dawn looks the one that came before it and each night, pitch black looks like the one that came before that though by Thursday she begins to imagine that it is lightening, taking off the edge for when the light will obliterate its hold.

Vasilisa walks into the empty moonless night wearing only her skin. The night and its air seize tight in her chest.

-

Baba Yaga hands over the skull of fire like it is a secret and Vasilisa wonders how she can walks through the hungry streets without anyone seeing it but as soon as she steps out of the walls of the bone palace, it is gone.

In her pocket, the standard six round revolver is replaced by a little silver gun. When she closes her fingers around it, she tastes all the deaths of Baba Yaga.

-

It takes a single bullet, black as the fleeing night and it takes down the house in a brilliant conflagration that lights up the sky line of the city like a set of artfully cast fireworks. Vasilisa feels the cold take flight from her bones the way it does when a shot of vodka is making its way through her veins. It feels like a celebration, the screams of her burning family from within sounding more like a series of notes on an organ instead.

 _When I bury the gun,_ she wonders, _will it become bone again?_


End file.
